Preserving State on the World Wide Web Using Dynamic Argument Embedding

The HTTP protocol which is used for communicating over the World Wide Web is stateless; every request from a client to a server is treated independently. We have developed a new method for preserving state on the World Wide Web known as dynamic argument embedding. The technique has advantages over HTML forms and Netscape cookies, which are two commonly used state preservation techniques. Unlike Netscape cookies, dynamic argument embedding works with all browsers and servers supporting the HTTP protocol. Our method can be generalized to other situations where it is necessary to dynamically modify or monitor HTML pages before they are received by a browser.